Hellboy 3: 10 Comic Plots That Should Be Used

With his gothic haunted house romance Crimson Peak now in cinemas, speculation will naturally turn to which of the many movies on his crowded slate director Guillermo del Toro will move on to. Specifically, the oft rumoured possibility of him wrapping up the Hellboy trilogy begun way back in 2004.

The last we heard of the apocalyptic demon and his red Right Hand of Doom on the big screen, the suggestion was that studio Legendary Pictures, the people behind Crimson Peak and Pacific Rim (along with this year's biggest movie Jurassic World), would wait until after Pacific Rim 2 to see whether it was worth backing Del Toro's long cherished desire for Hellboy III.

However, Legendary's recent announcement that the monsters vs. robots sequel was being "indefinitely delayed" means that the director has to rethink his next step. Whether this makes another Hellboy movie more likely or less is up for debate, but it certainly won't stop rumours. So, perhaps it's time to wonder just what might be in a third Hellboy movie.

Del Toro's Hellboy is, of course, a very different beast from comic creator Mike Mignola's. With Mignola's blessing and collaboration, the movies have happily carved out their own niche in which Del Toro delivers on what makes the original great, but also produced his own thing. But even bearing that in mind, there are a few things from the comics that it would be good to see in the third film.

This one's already been set up by the animated epilogue penned by Del Toro and Mignola that appears on the Golden Army DVD. While an eventual sequel is no way beholden to concepts set up in a DVD extra feature, the epilogue does suggest that Mignola and Del Toro are setting up some form of return for the first movie's villains, Kroenen and Rasputin. If so, then Zinco can easily be used as the mechanism to achieve that, even if not following the exact plot of the animation.

In the comics, the Zinco Corporation is an example of the classic covertly evil corporate behemoth, with seemingly endless resources and global connections. Having been dabbling in the paranormal since before the war, Zinco are both the provider of a huge amount of the B.P.R.D.'s equipment and involved in a number of secret projects to draw power from the dark side of Hellboy's supernatural universe.

The comics follow the death of Rasputin with CEO Roderick Zinco assisting Kroenen and other ex-Nazi scientists, alongside Rasputin's ghost, in attempting to awaken a legendary vampire.

The details of this particular plot are unlikely to be of much use to the film, but Zinco as a shadowy international organisation with the resources to serve as a plot mechanic to get the really powerful supernatural stuff moving seems a likely narrative. A version of Roderick Zinco could well serve the purpose of the initial villain, a human character reaching for enormous paranormal power, only to realise that he has been manipulated by forces much greater than himself (a recurring theme around Zinco Corporation schemes in the comics).